ASIA IS NONE OF NATO’S BUSINESS

The NATO Alliance’s Growing Ties With Japan And South Korea Raise Risk Of War With China Due To It Being An Intended Provocation.

Even as war raged along the alliance’s borders, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg was gallivanting around South Korea and Japan.

True to form, instead of working toward de-escalating the war in Ukraine to avoid a civilization-ending nuclear war with Russia, Stoltenberg appeared ready to tie the alliance into potential future conflicts in Asia, risking war with nuclear-armed China.

NATO has no business in the Indo-Pacific region. The alliance should instead stick to its North Atlantic mandate and avoid stoking powder kegs on the other side of the world.

The North Atlantic Treaty, the foundational basis of the alliance, explicitly covers only the North Atlantic region. Article 5, which includes the crucial language about “an attack against one … shall be considered an attack against them all” applies specifically just to Europe and North America.

This means that attacks on members’ vessels, aircraft or territory outside those regions will not automatically merit an alliance response. North Korea could strike Hawaii or Guam and NATO would not be obligated to strike back.

Stoltenberg’s visit not only went beyond NATO’s geographic mandate but was also an attempt to drag South Korea and Japan into the West’s inflammatory “democracies versus autocracies” paradigm.

To be clear, both South Korea and Japan lean into part of this framing, but more prudently than the West. The pair have focused primarily on preserving freedom and democracy, not on antagonizing other Asian governments for being autocracies.

To demonstrate their alignment with the West and NATO’s values, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol made an unusual appearance at NATO’s summit last June in Madrid, together with their Pacific counterparts from Australia and New Zealand.

Stoltenberg went beyond the measured posture of Yoon and Kishida, however, in remarks during his return visit this month by framing China as a direct challenge to freedom, democracy and Western values. He said NATO partnerships with South Korea and Japan are important and “necessary” to meet this challenge.

Seoul and Tokyo are well aware of this challenge, but both know that unnecessarily antagonizing Beijing could damage their interests. More significantly, NATO’s misadventure in Afghanistan showed how the alliance can be of little use outside of Europe and North America.

More alarmingly, Stoltenberg’s regular inferences that China, as an authoritarian state, is more likely to use force to achieve its national interests than the democratic-inclined members of NATO and its partner nations inflates the threat from Beijing.

His assertion that NATO expected countries to adopt the rule of law and democracy — as the alliance defined them — after the Cold War ended underlines the view that an authoritarian China is an automatic threat to the Indo-Pacific region and the globe.

Such assumptions could spark calls for regime change as the solution to the China challenge. This would cross a red line with Beijing, given the government’s commitment to keeping the Communist Party in power and in control over its governance future.

Not recognizing that China is genuinely interested in preserving its national sovereignty and territorial integrity denies the reality that even a democratic regime in Beijing would still want to establish control over Taiwan and advance territorial interests in the East and South China Seas and along the country’s Himalayan frontier.

Many forget that Taiwan, still formally the Republic of China, technically has most of the same territorial claims as Beijing and even nominally some more expansive ones, such as its constitutional assertion of sovereignty over the entirety of Mongolia.

Even more worryingly, Stoltenberg’s representation of NATO’s position on Taiwan appears unhelpful to cross-strait peace. In an interview with Nikkei Asia during his visit, he said NATO sought to “avoid any change of the status quo,” while repeatedly denying that China is an adversary and insisting that NATO is a defensive alliance.

Beijing could interpret his comments as covert containment, or as an indication that NATO would defend Taiwan if invaded. This could lead China to drop peaceful reunification efforts and look to attack or coerce Taiwan at an opportune time when NATO is distracted or busy rearming.

Stoltenberg and NATO members should drop the Indo-Pacific pivot and focus on the core purpose of the alliance: European security. NATO would benefit more from increased European defense spending which would far exceed that of Russia, the primary threat to Europe, if members followed through on commitments to budget 2% of their gross domestic product to security.

If European states took more responsibility, this would also bolster their defense against transnational threats like cyberattacks and terrorism. At the same time, with Europe handling the primary burden of securing its own defense, America could focus more on its vital national interests.

NATO has no business or mandate in the Indo-Pacific region. It should stay away from creating unnecessary tensions over ideology, stop assuming their claims of authoritarian rule in China makes a war of aggression inevitable and avoid inflaming cross-strait tensions. Its mission to bolster European defense is much more in NATO’s and the United States’ interests than driving towards war with China.

WHO BLEW UP THE NORD STREAM PIPELINE?

In September 2022, The Nord Stream Gas Pipelines Exploded In One Of The Most Spectacular Political And Environmental Acts Of Terrorism In History.

In the days immediately following the attack, which cut Germany and Europe off from its gas supply and released enormous amounts of methane gas into the atmosphere, the West immediately pronounced judgement against Russia. “No one on the European side of the ocean is thinking this is anything other than Russian sabotage,” said a senior European environmental official. American Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm immediately said that it “seems” Russia is to blame.

But investigations by Sweden, Denmark and Germany, countries close to the explosion site, were slow to report and unable to arrive at conclusions. Then, on December 21, 2022, The Washington Post reported that, after months of investigation, there is nothing to suggest that Russia was responsible. The Post article interviewed “23 diplomatic and intelligence officials in nine countries” who said that “[t]here is no evidence at this point that Russia was behind the sabotage.” It reports that “even those with inside knowledge of the forensic details don’t conclusively tie Russia to the attack.” The Wall Street Journal reports that there is a “growing sense among investigators in the U.S. and Europe that neither Russian-government nor pro-Russian operatives were behind the sabotage.”

But if Russia didn’t do it, then one of us did.

On February 8, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a detailed account of the “act of war” that concluded that it was carried out by America.

A month later, The New York Times has now published a story that assigns responsibility to “a pro-Ukrainian group.” The story is so thin and vague in its detail, its sourcing and its reporting that it seems surprising that it met the paper’s criteria for publication. The only thing the article seems to have done well is to divert the blame that Hersh concluded away from America, which was probably its intent.

The Times did not refute Hersh’s reporting. In mentioning his article for the first time, The Times said only that “In making his case, Mr. Hersh cited the president’s pre-invasion threat to “bring an end” to Nord Stream 2, and similar statements by other senior US officials.” But to represent Hersh’s reporting as relying only on public statements by American officials is to diminish the extensive detail provided to Hersh by “a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.”

Hersh has been accused of relying only on that one source. That too is unfair, not only because of Hersh’s long and reliable record of breaking important stories, but because it is misleading. Hersh’s source is the one who told him the story, but others corroborated it. Hersh has been very clear in making this point. To highlight it, Hersh prefaced the clarification in an interview by saying, “I’m telling you something important.” He then explained that “The people who own companies that build pipelines know the story. I didn’t get the story from them but I learned quickly they know.”

Unlike Hersh’s reporting, there is more in the Times report that is not known than that is known. “US officials,” the report says, “said there was much they did not know about the perpetrators and their affiliations.” The intelligence “does not specify the members of the group, or who directed or paid for the operation.”

But somehow, without knowing much about the perpetrators, their affiliations or who directed or paid for the operation, the one thing the American officials are confident about, as The Times makes clear at the very top of the article, is that there is “no evidence President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine or his top lieutenants were involved in the operation, or that the perpetrators were acting at the direction of any Ukrainian government officials.”

But no evidence is not evidence. And further down in the article, the report says that the American officials say “that there are no firm conclusions about it, leaving open the possibility that the operation might have been conducted off the books by a proxy force with connections to the Ukrainian government or its security services.” They say, too, that “it is possible that the perpetrators received specialized government training in the past.”

American officials told The Times that “there were still enormous gaps in what US spy agencies and their European partners knew about what transpired.” It is not even clear how much credibility they give the account of the sabotage: American officials “who have been briefed on the intelligence” told The Times anonymously that they “are divided about how much weight to put on the new information.”

Since The New York Times broke the story, a second report has come out. The leak, it turns out, is less of a leak than a press conference.

The same day as The Times report came out, Die Zeit reported that joint research by several German outlets found that “traces lead in the direction of Ukraine.” According to the German report, evidence that once unequivocally pointed to a massive operation that had to be carried out by a state actor, now pointed to a small six person operation on a yacht that was “rented from a company based in Poland” but “apparently owned by two Ukrainians.”

Like The New York Times report, the German report is characterized by more uncertainty than certainty. “The nationality of the perpetrators is apparently unclear,” and the investigation has “not yet found any evidence as to who ordered the destruction.” Although “traces lead to Ukraine, the investigators have not yet been able to find out who commissioned the suspected group of perpetrators.”

The next day, The Times of London suddenly reported that NATO had intelligence within a week of the explosion that the attack had been carried out “by a private venture originating in Ukraine.” Like the American and German reports, the British report says that the “private sponsor” was “a Ukrainian not affiliated with President Zelensky’s government.”

Though the media outlets have arrived at this conclusion, German intelligence has not. Die Zeit reports that a German government spokesman told the UN Security Council that investigations by Germany, Sweden and Denmark “are ongoing and that there are still no results.”

In its coverage of the story, The Washington Post says that “[t]he reports are far from conclusive.” The Wall Street Journal says the American report “isn’t definitive.” And not everyone is convinced. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius raised the questions of the possibility of a false flag operation and of differentiating “whether it was a Ukrainian group that acted on the orders of Ukraine or … without the government’s knowledge.” “As such,” he said, I’m refraining from drawing premature conclusions.”

Russia judged the report as “hardly believable.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the operation “was too difficult and was only within the scope of abilities of a well-trained, state-run intelligence service.” Former Russian President and current deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia Dmitry Medvedev evaluated the reports as “blatant low-rating B-movie stuff.” Medvedev said they were meant to trick Europeans, and Peskov said they were meant to overshadow Hersh’s reporting.

Whether the sabotage was carried out by America, as Hersh concludes, or Ukraine, as the German and British stories conclude, will be crucial to figure out. But what is crucial for Germany and Europe right now is that they are faced with a choice between two dangerous and consequential realities.

Either their American NATO ally betrayed and sacrificed them by blowing up the gas pipeline and cutting them off from their gas supply to prevent them from funding Russia’s invasion and from falling short of fully committing to the American led sanctions regime, or Ukraine, the country that they are financing and arming at great national cost, did. The former could have significant foreign policy consequences in the future; the latter could have significant consequences for arming Ukraine in the present.

If the “new intelligence” is true, that it insists that sabotage was carried out independently of the government in Kiev may make little difference to Germany, and not only because the intelligence doesn’t know who the perpetrators are or who they are affiliated with. It may also make little difference because Ukraine’s denials may mean little.

If Kiev were involved, American intelligence may not know it, since The New York Times reports that “US officials and intelligence agencies acknowledge that they have limited visibility into Ukrainian decision-making.”

But American intelligence has been suspicious of Ukraine’s denials of involvement in other recent acts of sabotage. When a car bomb blew up near Moscow in August 2022, killing Daria Dugina, Ukraine denied any involvement. But The New York Times reported in October that “United States intelligence agencies believe parts of the Ukrainian government authorized the car bomb attack near Moscow in August that killed Daria Dugina, the daughter of a prominent Russian nationalist. . . .” That assessment was shared with the American government who “admonished Ukrainian officials over the assassination.”

And on March 2, two villages in the Bryansk region of Russia on the border of Ukraine suffered an attack that killed at least two people. Responsibility was claimed by a far right nationalist group called the Russian Volunteer Corps. Ukraine has denied directly supporting the group and, according to The Times, “has strongly denied knowledge of either attack.” But the Corps’ founder, who goes both by the name of Denis Nikitin and Denis Kapustin, insists that the “cross-border raid he’d conducted from Ukraine into Russia had the endorsement of Kyiv.” He told The Financial Times that Ukrainian authorities signed off on the attack. “Yes, of course, this action was agreed,” he said, “otherwise it couldn’t have happened.” He went on to say that “If I did not co-ordinate it with anyone [in Ukraine’s military] . . . I think we would simply be destroyed.”

Germany and Europe are confronted with two possible conclusions on who blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines. Both conclusions are disturbing and dangerous. Either would affect their foreign policy and partnerships, and both could have profound consequences.

THE AMERICAN REGIME SAYS IT’S PREPARING AN “INFORMATION WAR” AGAINST CHINA

Its Allies Are Collaborating “To Share And Sharpen Information-Warfare Techniques In The Indo-Pacific” With The Goal Of “Countering” The “Increasingly Aggressive China.”

In an article published last week titled “US working with ‘Five Eyes’ nations, Japan on information warfare,” a publication on military intelligence and communications technology called C4ISRNET reports that America and its allies are collaborating “to share and sharpen information-warfare techniques in the Indo-Pacific” with the goal of “countering” the “increasingly aggressive China.”

Here’s an excerpt:

“Dialogues and exchanges of best practices are ongoing with Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K. and other countries including Japan, according to Vice Adm. Kelly Aeschbach, commander of Naval Information Forces.

“I want to say we have at least a dozen countries or so that are either establishing information warfare programs, or are interested in partnering further in the information warfare realm,” she said Feb. 15 at the West 2023 conference in San Diego. “We are leaning in there, we are focused.”

Japan, specifically, has expressed significant interest in information warfare, “in a really positive way,” Aeschbach told C4ISRNET. Japan and Australia, among others, are considered critical U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific, a region national security officials are invested in as they seek to counter an increasingly aggressive China.”

Libertarian Institute’s Kyle Anzalone and Connor Freeman have a good write-up on this latest revelation in which they explain that information warfare is “a broad swath of military operations a country can use to disrupt another” which “can include spreading disinformation or preventing the spread of information.”

As Anzalone and Freeman note, one significant recent instance of the American government’s acknowledged use of information warfare was when American officials told NBC News that the American government has been deliberately circulating unsubstantiated information to western news media “as part of an information war against Russia.”

Which is to say, they lied. When you do things like telling New York Times reporters that “Russia asked China to give it military equipment and support for the war in Ukraine after President Vladimir V. Putin began a full-scale invasion last month,” only to have NBC report that you knew this claim “lacked hard evidence,” you lied. You used your country’s mass media institutions to circulate disinformation.

Which is of course standard operating procedure for the American empire; the mass media have always been propaganda institutions used to manufacture consent for the economic and geopolitical status quo upon which the media-owning class has built its empire. Propaganda is nothing new, including propaganda against China. The difference now is that empire managers are getting increasingly comfortable with publicly acknowledging this fact, probably because the notion that the west needs to fight its own “information war” against its enemies has been gaining increasingly widespread traction since 2016.

And as we keep reiterating, the bizarre thing about this belief is that the propaganda from empire-targeted governments has virtually zero existence in the western world, while western propaganda dominates our information ecosystem. Before RT was shut down it was drawing just 0.04 percent of the UK’s total TV audience. The much-touted Russian election interference campaign on Facebook was mostly unrelated to the election and affected “approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content” according to Facebook, while research by New York University into Russian trolling behavior on Twitter in the lead-up to the 2016 election found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.” A study by the University of Adelaide found that despite all the warnings of Russian bots and trolls following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the overwhelming majority of inauthentic behavior on Twitter during that time was anti-Russian in nature.

So we can expect to see a multinational coordinated propaganda campaign against China, which could easily eclipse the anti-China propaganda campaign we’ve seen thus far, and could easily end up making the one against Russia look like child’s play.

It should infuriate everyone that our rulers are now flagrantly admitting that they manipulate our information environment to advance their own strategic interests. The only reason it doesn’t is because westerners are already so propagandized to the gills that the notion that our rulers should lie to us for our own good has gained so much traction that the empire can now openly imprison journalists for trying to tell us the truth.

In writing this practice is called “lampshading”, where you defuse any objection your audience might have to a glaring plot hole in your narrative by simply acknowledging that it’s there and then moving on. In this case the audience is every news-consuming person in the western world, and the narrative is the story the west has about itself.

Everything the western empire accuses its enemies of doing, it itself does far more egregiously. Westerners think of people in China as brainwashed victims of propaganda and censorship living in a power-serving homogenized information bubble, but that’s exactly what’s happening in our own society. And what’s worse, most westerners don’t even know it. And what’s even worse, they have the temerity to feel self-righteous about what free-thinking and free-speaking individualists they are compared to people in China.

AMERICA DOESN’T NEED TO ENGAGE IN HYSTERICAL CRUSADES AGAINST RUSSIA AND CHINA

Debates About The Ukraine War, And More Recently Chinese Balloons, Show How Little Tolerance There Is For Anything But A Hawkish Response.

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, many Western leaders have been tripping over themselves in an attempt to be seen to be doing more than their peers to support Ukraine in its war against Russia. The UK’s government’s recent apparent political coup in getting Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky to visit Britain before their European partners was portrayed in sections of the British press as a major political victory — scored in part because of the UK’s willingness to up the ante in supplying weapons to Ukraine, now with the apparent promise of fighter aircraft in the future.

Many Western politicians seem to be prioritizing signalling their political virtue in fighting what is presented as tyranny and promoting Western liberal democracy over realistic assessments of the costs and benefits of their actions.

This attitude isn’t limited to Russia’s war with Ukraine. The recent Chinese balloon incident in the United States saw what might almost be described as political hysteria on both sides of the American political divide. China is certainly — alongside Russia, Iran and North Korea — squarely within America’s political crosshairs and labelled as a threat to a Western-dominated international system.

The fury being levelled against such states in Western political circles and the press certainly warrants the suggestion that the West has whipped itself up into a frenzy of crusading zeal. Arguments offered by other state actors for their conduct — often pointing to similar actions by the West — are simply dismissed by Western leaders who are also willing to ignore the fact that Russia and China in particular are major powers with not only significant conventional military capabilities and potentials, but also nuclear weapons.

Such crusading ideas are supported by a number of prominent public figures. For example, historian Timothy Snyder and journalist Anne Appelbaum are at the forefront of the West’s current crusade against Russia in the name of Western liberal democracy. At the same time the mainstream Western press seems unwilling to offer material challenging this world view lest it be accused of being an apologist for the actions of states than are non gratae.

As we hurtle towards increasing Western conflict with much of the rest of the world, what is certainly lacking more than ever in Western foreign policy debate today is the ability to at least attempt to see things from an alternative point of view. Dare we say it — because as it relates to foreign policy has become something of a dirty word — we need a little more realism in our dealings with Russia and those other countries who are lumped together as the bad guys in international politics.

In the black and white world of Western international relations today suggesting a more realist approach to foreign policy means that you are simply a stooge of a foreign adversary — as John Mearsheimer has found out. But if we continue to ignore the idea that other state actors might have legitimate concerns — that are backed up by significant military power — we risk careering toward a global conflict that can only end badly.

While realist theorists have gained some media exposure early on in Russian’s war against Ukraine, cultural relativism, or what we might alternatively call cultural tolerance, has been even less in evidence. In the context of this piece, cultural relativism is trying to understand another state from the perspective of the cultural norms and understandings of that society, and not our own. It is very different from moral relativism in that it doesn’t imply that we need agree with those alternative outlooks — we simply need to try to understand and appreciate them.

By at least trying to understand where other countries are coming from there is arguably more likelihood of meaningful engagement that might even lead to small steps in some of the directions that Western leaders would like to see them move.

A realist and therefore to some extent culturally relativist approach doesn’t mean that the West cannot promote those things that are of value to it. It does however mean that diplomacy isn’t a winner takes all game.

Sadly, a more realistic and culturally tolerant approach to many international issues today would not serve the egos and interests of many politicians who have boxed themselves into a corner over their maximalist stances. Nor would a change of tack, and particularly over Russia and Ukraine, suit Western energy companies or an American military-industrial complex that is one of the principal beneficiaries of the war in Ukraine. However, this kind of realist engagement is ultimately going to be the only way to save the many lives that will otherwise be lost in the sort of clash of civilizations that has brought so much human misery over the few millennia that humans have been able to document their follies.

No matter how hard some might wish, the war in Ukraine is unlikely to lead to any sort of crushing Russian defeat on the battlefield, and sooner or later negotiations will have to take place. If future negotiations are to be meaningful, both sides will have to give ground and make some attempt to see something of the other side’s point of view.

We can only hope that enough political leaders come to their senses and try to acknowledge at least some credibility in the other side’s position before both the local and global costs of the war in Ukraine and the growing friction with the likes of China increase too much further.

WHATEVER THEY DECIDE THESE UFOS ARE, THE ANSWER WILL BE MORE AMERICAN MILITARISM

American Planes Claim To Have Shot Down Three Unidentified Objects In North American Airspace Over The Last Three Days, Which Is Unprecedented And Highly Suspicious.

On Sunday an octagon-shaped object was reportedly shot down over Lake Huron near the Canadian border after first being detected some 1,300 miles away over Montana on Saturday night. On Saturday a cylindrical object was reportedly shot down over Canada’s Yukon territory by an American F-22, and on Friday an object “about the size of a small car” was reportedly shot down after being detected over Alaska.

Unlike the Chinese balloon that was shot down earlier this month which America claims was an instrument of espionage, as of this writing there’s still no solid consensus as to what these last three objects were or where they came from. While all three were found at high altitude like the balloon, the Pentagon is refusing to classify them as such, with the head of America’s Northern Command General Glen VanHerck going as far as to say it hadn’t yet been determined how these objects are even staying aloft.

“I’m not going to categorize them as balloons. We’re calling them objects for a reason,” VanHerck told the press on Sunday. “I’m not able to categorize how they stay aloft. It could be a gaseous type of balloon inside a structure or it could be some type of a propulsion system. But clearly, they’re — they’re able to stay aloft.”

VanHerck also made headlines for saying he couldn’t rule out extraterrestrial origin for the objects.

To further confuse things, China has detected a UFO of its own that it was preparing to shoot down according to a report on Sunday. Last month Russia reported that it had shot down a UFO as well. A report on Saturday said the air force of Uruguay is investigating strange lights over the sky in the western part of the country.

But of course it could still be balloons. Moon of Alabama made a pretty good argument the other day that the object shot down over Alaska was likely a failed American weather balloon. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says he was told by the White House that all of these mystery objects are believed by American officials to have been Chinese spy balloons, though the White House swiftly disputed this claim, saying it’s too early to categorize them as such.

You shouldn’t become uncomfortable not knowing what the hell is going on with any of this right now. There is good reason to be intensely skeptical of the new UFO narrative that entered the mainstream in 2017 under highly suspicious circumstances, but we are not pretending we know everything about this weird universe we’ve all tumbled into. You should remain open to all possibilities, from mundane balloons, to a sudden increase in interest in aerial objects that have long been common, to an American government psyop, to lightbulb-headed visitors from the great unknown.

So we don’t really know what these UFOs are. But we do know what they will be used for.

It is a very safe bet that whatever the American government determines these objects to be, the response to that determination will feature increased militarism and the advancement of pre-existing Pentagon agendas. We’re already seeing Florida congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna using the UFO incidents to argue for sanctions on China and to accuse Beijing of “cyber warfare”, and Republicans are already claiming that the threat of Chinese spy balloons means there can be no cuts to military spending.

In an article titled “Chinese spy balloon has GOP saying no cuts to defense,” The Hill’s Alexander Bolton quotes numerous congressional Republicans arguing that military cuts should be taken off the table in their negotiation over a debt ceiling, and that ideally the spending should be increased.

“The entire civilized world should recognize that communist China is probably the greatest threat we’ve ever faced, more severe than Soviet Russia was because of its economic integration into the West,” says perpetually war-horny senator Tom Cotton. “We should take every step we can to try to reduce our dependency on China [and] try to build stronger military deterrence against them.”

“I do not think that we should be talking about cutting the defense budget at all right now. If anything, substantial defense increases,” Cotton adds.

For the imperial swamp the answer is always more militarism; it doesn’t matter what the question is. Whether they decide these UFOs are a foreign threat or something unknown or something else entirely, the solution funneled through the American empire’s groupthink apparatus will entail more military spending and more weapons of war.

And again we remain open to all possibilities, but we do find it very interesting that we’re seeing completely unprecedented aerial kinetic warfare in North American skies which is certain to lead to more Ameican military expansionism at the exact same time America prepares its “great power competition” against China and the governments aligned with it.

As we’ve discussed previously, the empire has been going to extraordinary lengths to make sure the public plays along with a long-term campaign to secure American unipolar planetary hegemony. However this UFO narrative ends up playing out, we may be certain that it will be used to facilitate this agenda.

AMERICA WAS BEHIND THE NORD STREAM PIPELINE SABOTAGE

Legendary NYT Journalist Seymour Hersh Has Claimed That Washington “Took Out” The Russian Gas Pipelines As Many (If Not Most) Had Suspected.

The Nord Stream pipelines were destroyed last September by America in a covert operation, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has claimed. The legendary reporter made the bombshell revelation in an article posted to his newly launched blog on Substack on Wednesday.

The explosives were planted at the pipelines back in June 2022 by American Navy divers under the guise of the BALTOPS 22 NATO exercise, Hersh reported, citing a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.

The journalist noted that he had reached out to the White House and CIA for comment, with both firmly rejecting the claim that America “took out” the pipelines as “utterly false.”

The bombs were detonated three months later on September 26 with a remote signal sent by a sonar buoy. The buoy was dropped near the Nord Stream pipelines by a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane, according to the report.

The operation came to fruition following months of back-and-forth between the White House, CIA, and military, with officials focusing on how to leave no trace of American involvement in the attack. The planning process began back in December 2021, when a special task force was created with the direct participation of American National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.

“The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to assault the pipeline directly. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes,” the report read.

The source told Hersh that everybody involved understood the operation was not some “kiddie stuff” but was actually an “an act of war.” Throughout “all of this scheming” certain officials urged the White House to drop the idea entirely. “Some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, ‘Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out,’” according to the source.

Originally, the explosives were to have a 48-hour timer and were set to be planted by the end of BALTOPS22, Hersh reported, citing the same source. The two-day window, however, was ultimately deemed to be too close to the end of the exercise by the White House, which ordered the task force to come up with an on-demand method of detonating them. This ultimately turned out to be the sonar buoy.

The administration of President Joe Biden has been “focused” on jeopardizing the Nord Stream pipelines – initially through sanctions, and, ultimately, by direct sabotage – seeing it as key to swaying Europe to its cause amid the then-looming conflict in Ukraine, Hersh noted.

“As long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to defeat Russia,” he wrote.

Moscow provided a similar take on the incident shortly after the blasts, branding them a “terrorist attack” and stating that America was the nation that benefited most from it, by accelerating Europe’s attempts to wean itself off of Russian gas.

Throughout his career, Hersh has reported on numerous explosive stories, including war crimes by the American military and high-profile political scandals. Exposing the My Lai massacre by American troops in Vietnam scored the journalist the Pulitzer Prize in 1970. Other notable stories Hersh reported on include the Watergate scandal, the CIA illegal domestic spying, as well as the American military’s torture and abuse of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

AMERICA IS PROVOKING RUSSIA TO HIT BACK

Well, The Homicidal Warmongers Won The Debate Over Sending Tanks To Ukraine, So Now It’s Time For Them To Start Arguing For Sending Them F-16s.

In an article titled “Ukraine sets sights on fighter jets after securing tank supplies,” Reuters reports the following:

“Ukraine will now push for Western fourth generation fighter jets such as the U.S. F-16 after securing supplies of main battle tanks, an adviser to Ukraine’s defence minister said on Wednesday.”

Ukraine won a huge boost for its troops as Germany announced plans to provide heavy tanks for Kyiv on Wednesday, ending weeks of diplomatic deadlock on the issue. The United States is poised to make a similar announcement.

Just in time for the good news, Lockheed Martin has announced that the arms manufacturing giant happens to be all set to ramp up production of F-16s should they be needed for shipment to Ukraine.

“Lockheed Martin has said that it’s ready to meet demands for F-16 fighter jets if the US and its allies choose to ship them to Ukraine,” Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp reports. “So far, the US and its allies have been hesitant to send fighter jets to Ukraine due to concerns that they could be used to target Russian territory. But the Western powers seem less and less concerned about escalation as the US and Germany have now pledged to send their main battle tanks.”

The New York Times has a new article out titled “How Biden Reluctantly Agreed to Send Tanks to Ukraine,” subtitled “The decision unlocked a flow of heavy arms from Europe and inched the United States and its NATO allies closer to direct conflict with Russia.” It’s authors David E. Sanger, Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper write:

“President Biden’s announcement Wednesday that he would send M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine came after weeks of tense back-channel negotiations with the chancellor of Germany and other European leaders, who insisted that the only way to unlock a flow of heavy European arms was for the United States to send tanks of its own.

His decision, however reluctant, now paves the way for German-made Leopard 2 tanks to be delivered to Ukraine in two or three months, provided by several European nations. While it is unclear whether it will make a decisive difference in the spring offensive that President Volodymyr Zelensky is now planning to take back territory seized by Russia, it is the latest in a series of gradual escalations that has inched the United States and its NATO allies closer to direct conflict with Russia.”

When even the myopic empire simps at The New York Times are acknowledging that western powers are escalating aggressions in a very dangerous direction, you should probably sit up and pay attention.

In a recent article for Responsible Statecraft titled “Mission Creep? How the US role in Ukraine has slowly escalated,” Branko Marcetic outlines the ways the American empire has “serially blown past their own self-imposed lines over arms transfers,” over and over again relenting to war hawks and requests from Ukrainian officials to supply weapons which it had previously refrained from supplying for fear that they would be too escalatory and lead to hot warfare between nuclear superpowers. Marcetic notes the way previously unthinkable aggressions like NATO spy agencies conducting sabotage operations on Russian infrastructure are now accepted, with more escalations being called for as soon as the previous one was made.

Toward the end of his article, Marcetic drives home a very important point which needs more attention: that the western alliance has established a policy of continually escalating every time Russia doesn’t react forcefully to a previous western escalation, which necessarily means Russia is being actively incentivized to react forcefully to those escalations.

“By escalating their support for Ukraine’s military, the U.S. and NATO have created an incentive structure for Moscow to take a drastic, aggressive step to show the seriousness of its own red lines,” Marcetic writes. “This would be dangerous at the best of times, but particularly so when Russian officials are making clear they increasingly view the war as one against NATO as a whole, not merely Ukraine, while threatening nuclear response to the alliance’s escalation in weapons deliveries.”

“Moscow keeps saying escalatory arms transfers are unacceptable and could mean wider war; US officials say since Moscow hasn’t acted on those threats, they can freely escalate. Russia is effectively told it has to escalate to show it’s serious about lines,” Marcetic added on Twitter.

A good recent example of this dynamic is the recent New York Times report that the Biden administration is considering backing a Ukrainian offensive on Crimea, which many experts agree is one of the most likely ways this conflict could lead to nuclear warfare. The article reports that the Biden administration has assessed that Russia is unlikely to reciprocate an escalatory aggression, but the basis for that assessment apparently comes from nothing other than the fact that Russia hasn’t done so yet.

“Crimea has already been hit many times without a massive escalation from the Kremlin,” the Times quotes a RAND Corporation think tanker as saying in explanation for the Biden administration’s belief that it can get away with backing a Crimea offensive. But as Dave DeCamp explained at the time, that’s not even true; Russia did significantly escalate its aggressions in response to strikes on Crimea, beginning to target critical Ukrainian infrastructure in ways it previously had not.

So Russia has in fact been escalating its aggressions in response to attacks on Crimea; it just hasn’t been escalating them against NATO powers. As long as Russia is only escalating in ways that hurt Ukrainians, the American-centralized power structure does not regard them as real escalations. The take-home message to Moscow being that they’re going to get squeezed harder and harder until they attack NATO itself.

And of course that won’t de-escalate things either; it will be seized on and spun as evidence that Putin is a reckless madman who is attacking the free world completely unprovoked and must be stopped at all cost, even if it means risking nuclear armageddon. Russia would of course be aware of this obvious reality, so the only way it takes the bait is if the pain of not reacting gets to a point where it is perceived as outweighing the pain of reacting. But judging by its actions the empire seems determined to push them to that point.

It really is spooky how much de-escalation and detente have been disappeared from public discourse about Russia. People genuinely don’t seem to know it’s an option. They really do think the only option is continually escalating nuclear brinkmanship, and that anything else is obsequious appeasement. They think that because that’s the message they are being fed by the imperial propaganda machine, and they’re being fed that message because that is the empire’s actual position.

We have been warning about the increasing risk of nuclear armageddon for as long as we have been publicly engaged in political commentary, and people have been calling us a hysterical idiot and a Putin puppet the entire time even as we’ve moved closer and closer to the exact point we have been screaming about at the top of our lungs for years. Now there’s not a whole lot closer it can get without being directly upon us. We deeply, deeply hope we can turn this thing around before it’s too late.

“CHINESE AGGRESSION” SURE LOOKS AN AWFUL LOT MORE LIKE AMERICAN AGGRESSION

House Speaker Kevin Mccarthy Has Been Accused Of Planning A Trip To Taiwan, Which Will Be Yet Another Incendiary Provocation Against Beijing If It Occurs.

The previous House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, sparked a significant escalation in hostilities with her visit last year, the consequences of which are still reverberating today.

Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp explains:

“Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan was viewed in Beijing as a major provocation, and it sparked the largest-ever Chinese military drills around the island. The exercises included China firing missiles over Taiwan and simulating a blockade of the island, both unprecedented actions.

China has kept up the military pressure on Taiwan since Pelosi’s visit, and its warplanes regularly now cross the median line, an informal barrier that divides the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. Before Pelosi’s trip, China barely crossed the line. Now, it’s an almost-daily occurrence.

Beijing views the US House speaker visiting Taiwan as an affront to the one-China policy and the understanding the US and China reached in 1979, when Washington severed formal relations with Taipei.”

American provocations and escalations against China are becoming a regular occurrence, both from the America itself and from its imperial assets like Australia and Taiwan. Yet according to the western political/media class, the urgent threat of our day is “Chinese aggression”.

After the House of Representatives voted to approve the new Select Committee on China — a Republican initiative designed to increase internal pressure in the American government to ramp up the new cold war — the committee’s chairman Mike Gallagher put out a statement saying that it is “time to push back against the Chinese Communist Party’s aggression in bipartisan fashion.”

Gallagher is a particularly noxious warmonger who says urgent efforts must be made to stop China from “destroying the capitalist system led by the United States in order to make way for the triumph of world socialism with Chinese characteristics.” He advocates the “selective decoupling” from specific sectors of the Chinese economy and says America is in “the early stages of a new cold war” against China. He advocates pouring weapons into Taiwan in much the same way America did in the lead-up to its proxy war in Ukraine, and asserts that America needs to be preparing for a direct hot war with China in the near future.

Gallagher’s hawkishness on China is quickly becoming the mainstream consensus position in the western political/media class as the American-centralized empire ramps up aggressions while continually complaining about Chinese aggression.

The American empire has been increasingly positioning its war machinery around China since the Obama administration’s “Pivot to Asia” in ways that would have led to an immediate third world war if the roles were reversed, and its aggressions have escalated with each subsequent administration. Just in the last couple of months we’ve had news that America is planning on returning to its Subic Bay base in the Philippines as part of its encirclement campaign against China, and also intends to station missile-armed marines along Japan’s Okinawa islands. The American regime is also reportedly working on building a network of missile systems on a chain of islands near the Chinese mainland, explicitly for the goal of countering China. America and its allies have dramatically increased their naval presence in disputed waters near China, viewed as acts of aggression by Beijing.

None of this would be tolerated by the United States if China were openly moving its war machinery into adjacent areas with the stated goal of “countering the US”. If China were doing this, it would be a near-unanimous consensus throughout the western world that China was engaged in hostile provocations and was clearly the aggressor. Nobody would listen to China if it claimed it was militarily encircling America for defensive purposes.

But that’s exactly what happens with American aggressions against China. It’s just taken as matter of fact when the American regime says it’s moving more and more war machinery into the waters around China as a defensive precaution to deter Chinese aggression. Because the narrative is coming from the most effective propaganda machine ever devised, we hear “No bro, the US is militarily encircling its number one geopolitical rival on the other side of the planet defensively. Because like what if China tries to do something aggressive?”

In a surprisingly decent Foreign Affairs article titled “The Problem With Primacy,” Van Jackson argues that America is behaving in such a transparently aggressive manner toward China that it can’t possibly claim to be acting in the interests of preserving peace and stability in the region.

“This is not the rationale of a country that is simply balancing Chinese power or trying to stop Beijing from creating a sphere of influence,” writes Jackson of the recent American semiconductor export ban against China. “It is not the strategy of a state trying to decouple from the Chinese economy. It is containment in all but name.”

“The Pentagon has promised that 2023 will be ‘the most transformative year in US force posture in the region in a generation,’ a line likely meant to be reassuring but that comes off as ominous,” Jackson writes. “The Department of Defense is making good on this promise by modernizing its large traditional presence in Northeast Asia while increasing its footprint in the Pacific Islands and Australia—areas that the Chinese military cannot seriously contest.”

Jackson argues that Washington’s efforts to halt China’s rise will likely achieve nothing besides provoking China into militarizing against it, saying, “There is no reason to believe that spending over a trillion dollars modernizing the U.S. nuclear arsenal or selling submarines to Australia will cause China to do anything but continue arming itself as quickly as possible.”

This aligns with the warnings of an anonymous American official cited in a November article by Bloomberg, who said that “the hawkish tone in DC has contributed to a cycle where the US makes the first move, interprets Chinese reactions as a provocation, and then escalates further.”

It’s America making the first move every time.

Taiwan is an odd case because empire apologists will openly tell you that Beijing must never control the island as it’s a geostrategically crucial location with essential semiconductor manufacturing, and then turn around and still try to tell you that Washington’s interest in Taiwan is because it wants to protect freedom and democracy. It’s even more transparent than when they were pretending to yearn for the liberation of nations that just so happened to sit on a lot of oil.

We don’t know if Beijing will ever launch an attack on Taiwan or some other future flashpoint, but if it does it seems a safe bet that it will be because the American empire kept ramping up aggressions and provocations until it got to the point that China felt it was losing more from inaction than it would from action. And then empire apologists will spend all day shrieking at anyone who tries to talk about those provocations.

Because that’s the rule now, if you weren’t aware. As of February 2022 we’re all meant to pretend that the concept of provocation is not a commonplace idea that everyone understands and learns about as children, but that “provocation” is rather a nonsensical propaganda word that was invented by Vladimir Putin last year. It is now no longer permissible for you to talk about the aggressions that led up to a nation going to war; we must all pretend that history began the day their troops crossed the border.

History is being re-written with Ukraine, and if war erupts over Taiwan it will probably be re-written there as well. But note to the future: the road to war was paved by mountains of American aggression.

WILL 2023 BE EVEN WORSE THAN 2022 AS WE STEP INTO WORLD WAR III?

The Appearance Of An Article Dealing With A Cool Discussion Of The Survivability From A Nuclear War Suggests That The Nutcases Ruling America Are Avoiding The Psychiatric Hospital.

Even though one has become accustomed to seeing the United States government behaving irrationally on an epic scale with no concern for what happens to the average citizen who is not a member of one of the freak show constituencies of the Democratic Party, it is still possible to be surprised or even shocked. Shortly before year’s end 2022 an article appeared in the mainstream media and was quite widely circulated. The headline that it was featured under in the original Business Insider version read “A nuclear attack would most likely target one of these 6 US cities — but an expert says none of them are prepared.” The cities were New York, Washington DC, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and San Francisco.

The article seeks to provide information and tips that would allow one to survive a nuclear attack, repeating commentary from several “experts” in emergency management and “public health” suggesting that a nuclear war would be catastrophic but not necessarily the end of the world. One should be prepared. It observes that “those cities would struggle to provide emergency services to the wounded. The cities also no longer have designated fallout shelters to protect people from radiation.” It is full of sage advice and off-the-cuff observations, including “Can you imagine a public official keeping buildings intact for fallout shelters when the real-estate market is so tight?” Or even better the advice from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)’s “nuclear detonation planning guide” that for everyday citizens in a city that has been nuked: “Get inside, stay inside, and stay tuned.” Dr. Ron Paul asks “Are they insane? They act as if a nuclear attack on the United States is just another inconvenience to plan for, like an ice storm or a hurricane.”

The article argues that the six cities would be prime targets as they are centers for vital infrastructure. The bomb blasts would kill hundreds of thousands or even millions of Americans with many more deaths to follow from radiation poisoning, but the article makes no attempt to explain why Russia, with a relatively sane leadership, would want to start a nuclear war that would potentially destroy the planet. Also, the targeting list of the cities provided by the “experts” is itself a bit odd. Surely Russia would attack military and government targets as a first priority to limit the possible retaliation while also crippling the ability of the White House and Pentagon to command and control the situation. Such targets would include both San Diego and Norfolk where the Atlantic and Pacific fleets are based as well as the various Strategic Air Command bases and the underground federal government evacuation site in Mount Weather Virginia.

Reading the article, one is reminded of the early years of the Cold War that sought to reassure the public that nuclear war was somehow manageable. It was a time when we elementary school children were drilled in hiding under our desks when the air raid alarm went off. Herman Kahn was, at that time, the most famous advocate of the school of thought that the United States could survive the “unthinkable,” i.e. a nuclear war. An American physicist by training, Kahn became a founding member of the beyond neocon nationalist Hudson Institute, which is still unfortunately around. Kahn, who served in the Army during the Second World War as a non-combat telephone lineman, started has career as a military strategist at the RAND Corporation. Kahn endorsed a policy of deterrence and argued that if the Soviet Union believed that the United States had a devastating second-strike capability then Moscow would not initiate hostilities, which he explained in his paper titled “The Nature and Feasibility of War and Deterrence”. The Russians had to believe that even a perfectly coordinated massive attack would guarantee a measure of retaliation that would leave them devastated as well. Kahn also posited his idea of a “winnable” nuclear exchange in his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War for which he is often cited as one of the inspirations for the title character of Stanley Kubrick’s classic film Dr. Strangelove.

The appearance of the Business Insider article dealing with a cool discussion of the survivability from a nuclear war suggests that the nutcases are again escaping from the psychiatric hospital here in America and are obtaining top jobs in government and the media. While one continues to hope that somehow someone will wake up in the White House and realize that the deep dark hole that we the American people find ourselves in mandates a change of course and a genuine reset, there is little daylight visible in the darkness.

My particular concern relates to the entangling relationships that have kept our country permanently at war in spite of the fact that since the Cold War ended in 1991 no potential adversary has actually threatened the United States. Now, the federal government appears to be in the business of cultivating dangerous relationships to justify defense spending and placing the nation on the brink of what might prove to be catastrophic. The current American mission to “weaken Russia” and eventually also China in order to maintain its own “rules based international order” includes such hypocritical and utterly illegal under international law anomalies as the continued military occupation of part of Syria to deny that country’s leaders’ access to their oil fields and best agricultural land. A recent UN humanitarian agency investigation determined that the Syrian people are suffering and even starving as a result of that and American imposed sanctions that the Biden Administration maintains against all reason and humanity.

At the present time, however, the most entangling of all relationships, even more than with Israel, has to be the engagement of America in the proxy war being fought against Russia on behalf of Ukraine, which is exactly what threatens to turn nuclear if someone blinks at the wrong time. Billions of dollars in direct aid as well as billions more in the form of weapons stripped from arsenals in Europe and America have been given to the corrupt regime of President Volodymyr Zelensky while Zelensky continues to work assiduously to milk the situation and draw Washington into a deeper war directly confronting Moscow.

In fact, by some reckonings the war has already begun, with America and its allies clearly dedicated to crippling the Russian economy while also getting rid of President Vladimir Putin. The 101st Airborne is now in place in Romania next to Ukraine to “warn” the Kremlin while the Pentagon has recently admitted that some American military personnel are already in Ukraine, contrary to the denials by White House spokesmen. The British have also revealed that some of their elite Special Ops personnel are on the ground. And there are reports that more American soldiers will soon be on the way, ostensibly to “track the weapons” being provided to Zelensky, which will include American-made, Patriot Missile batteries some of which might even be placed in NATO member Poland to provide air cover over Western Ukraine, a definite act of war as seen by Russia, which has warned that such a move would mean that America and its allies had “effectively become a party” to the war in Ukraine and there will be “consequences.” “Consequences” means escalation.

The soldier-“trackers” mission may be in response to reports that weapons provided by NATO have been corruptly sold or given to third countries by the Ukrainians. The several American initiatives taken together could produce a rapid escalation of the conflict complete with dead Americans coming home in body bags and an inevitable direct involvement in combat roles that could lead anywhere, but at this point it is the Russians who are acting with restraint by not targeting the NATO and American “advisers” who are already active in Ukraine.

Suspicion is also growing that the United States “green-lighted” in advance recent cruise missile attacks carried out by Ukraine against military targets deep inside Russia. Since the attacks, the White House has declared that Ukraine has “permission” to attack Russia and has basically conceded to the unbalanced Zelensky the right to make all the decisions and run the war that America is largely funding, which is a formula for disaster. It is already known that Ukraine is receiving top level intelligence provided both by America and also other NATO states. The precision attacks on Russia suggest that the Ukrainian army was given the coordinates of possible active targets, something that America would be capable of providing but which would have been beyond the abilities of Ukraine, which possesses no satellite surveillance capability. If it is true that the White House was involved in escalating the conflict it would be a very dangerous move, inviting retaliation by Moscow.

To be sure, some idiots in Washington, mostly of the neocon variety, continue to see war against Russia as something like a crusade for world freedom. Rick Newman, Yahoo’s top Finance Columnist, observes how “Budget hawks in Congress are worried about granting President Biden’s request for an additional $38 billion in aid for Ukraine to help defeat the invading Russians.” He concludes “They’re right. Thirty-eight billion isn’t enough. Make it $50 billion. Or even $100 billion. The more, the better, until the job is done.”

Apparently, the bellicose Rick does not quite get that Russia has made clear that if it is about to be defeated by force majeure it will go nuclear. And Congress and the White House don’t seem to get it either, with both the Republican and Democratic parties oblivious to the real danger that confronts the American people. Nuclear war? Sure! Just hide in your basement, if you have one, and tune in.

THE OUTRAGEOUS COST OF BLOWING UP THE WORLD

Bipartisan Insanity Was On Display Again Last Week As Congress Responded To Biden’s Requested $37 Billion In Additional Aid To Ukraine By Actually Giving Him $45 Billion.

The aid was part of an overall omnibus spending bill passed by both houses of Congress was a gargantuan $1.7 trillion and included $858 billion in defense spending which far exceeds any sum ever spent by the American government in all of history.

Of that $858 billion, $817 billion is allocated directly to the Department of Defense while the remaining $29 billion will be allocated to national security programs within the department of energy.

CONTINUING TO WEAPONIZE TAIWAN

2023 NDAA Funds will be used to “strengthen” Taiwan in the Pacific with $12 billion authorized to assist Taiwan in purchasing weapons from the military industrial complex (with the $12 billion in ‘loans’ needing to be paid back over the course of the next five years of course). Of this fund, $100 million will be given directly to contractors to fill up a “contingency stockpile” to be used by Taiwan “in case of any future conflict”.

Additionally Taiwan will be invited to participate in the next American led Rim of the Pacific Military Exercise in 2024 and thus greater “Pacific NATO” strategy encircling mainland China. This exercise and broader Pacific NATO (aka Quad) anti-China arsenal of puppet colonies will be boosted by an additional $11.5 billion will be allocated to the Pacific Deterrence Initiative ‘to counter malign Chinese influence in the Pacific’.

Just as Ukraine has suffered American directed color revolutions in 2004 and 2014, so too has Taiwan been strung through a similar NED-funded ‘Sunflower Revolution’ regime change in 2014 which saw the Kuomintang Party taken out of power just as final stages of an economic integration agreement with mainland China were being finalized.

Billions have been tagged to purchase Lockheed Martin Corp’s (LMT.N) F-35 fighter jets and ships made by General Dynamics but beyond airforce, one of the biggest and most dangerous boosts in spending this year has been absorbed by a fixation on ‘space warfare’. $5.3 billion will be directed towards ‘space force’ and the ongoing effort to militarize space as a new dimension in war making in the 21st century (which was $333 million more than originally requested by military officials at space force’).

The recent America, Canada, Australia joint ‘space warfare’ drills in order to prepare for an oncoming war over Europe took place at the start of December 2022 at the Schriever Space Force Base in Colorado- which indicates that the residues of any positive memory of ‘space diplomacy’ once seen under JFK’s leadership, the 1976 Apollo-Soyuz cooperation program or even the better aspects of President Trump’s Artemis Accord.

THE 2000 RAD ORIGINS OF NDAA 2023’S DARK AGE DOCTRINE

If one wishes to grasp the germ seed of today’s policy doctrine, it would be necessary to revisit the Project for a New American Century Think Tank’s September 2000 Rebuilding America’s Defenses report where the end of history cultists then taking the helm of government stated:

“RAD” envisions a future in which the United States is in complete control of land, sea, air, space and cyberspace of planet Earth. It finds objectionable the limitations imposed by the ABM treaty and urges a newer rendition of Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ defense shield program.

On top of calling for the USA’s exit from the ABM Treaty (which was promptly done in the wake of 911), the authors of RAD outline in clear detail the rationale behind the growth of the rise of a need for a new branch of the military known as space force. The authors stated that the USA must gain:

“CONTROL THE NEW ‘INTERNATIONAL COMMONS’ OF SPACE AND ‘CYBERSPACE,’ and pave the way for the creation of a new military service – U.S. Space Forces – with the mission of space control.”

Outlining the doctrine of ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ the PNAC report outlined:

Global Missile Defenses — “A network against limited strikes, capable of protecting the United States, its allies and forward-deployed forces, must be constructed. This must be a layered system of land, sea, air and space-based components”.

Looking towards the need to expand and modernize nuclear forces due to the possible danger of China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and Iraq, the RAD authors stated:

“Today’s strategic calculus encompasses more factors than just the balance of terror between the United States and Russia. U.S. nuclear force planning and related arms control policies must take account of a larger set of variables than in the past, including the growing number of small nuclear arsenals – from North Korea to Pakistan to, perhaps soon, Iran and Iraq – and a modernized and expanded Chinese nuclear force.”

Possibly one of the most dangerous and revealing aspects of RAD, was found on page 60, where the authors outline a program that soon grew into obscene proportions in the wake of the 2001 Anthrax attacks which justified the later passage of Cheney’s 2004 Bioshield Act as well as the growth of the 320+ international biolabs run by the pentagon. Describing the conversion of bioweapons from the realm of terror to “a political useful tool”, the authors state:

“Although it may take several decades for the process of transformation to unfold, in time, the art of warfare on air, land, and sea will be vastly different than it is today, and ‘combat’ likely will take place in new dimensions: in space, ‘cyber-space,’ and perhaps the world of microbes… Space itself will become a theater of war, as nations gain access to space capabilities and come to rely on them; further, the distinction between military and commercial space systems – combatants and non-combatants – will become blurred. Information systems will become an important focus of attack, particularly for U.S. enemies seeking to short-circuit sophisticated American forces. And advanced forms of biological warfare that can target specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool”

BACK TO UKRAINE

How will the $45 billion Ukraine money burning project be used? That’s not so easy to say exactly?

What we do know is that $22.9 billion will go towards that Kiev will be expected to use to buy more weapons from private American based defense contractors and much of the rest will be enjoyed by NGOs and Non Profits which will more often than not be run by figures closely tied to those same creatures in the Washington swamp who voted for these bills.

These uncomfortable facts were outlined repeatedly by the oft-slandered republican Senator Marjorie Taylor Greene whose multiple attempts to create some form of oversight and auditing of the handouts to Ukraine have been met with absurd levels of resistance since the special operation was launched in February. Even when such operations as the FTX crypto exchange (a major partner to Kiev and the World Economic Forum) was discovered to be simply a money laundering outfit infusing vast sums into the coffers of the DNC that were tied to Ukrainian operations, hardly a single western Mockingbird press outlet made a peep.

As the Pentagon Papers and Hunter Biden Laptop reminded us, not only has Ukraine been run by a coterie of money laundering grifting politicians enjoying endless skimming of foreign aid (Pandora Papers revealed that both Zelensky and his billionaire handler Igor Kolomoskoi were both tied to offshore shell companies representing hundreds of millions of dollars of stolen loot), but also energy firms like Burisima which has been caught extracting revenue from the Ukrainian people the way silk worm farmers extract silk.

And what happens if you find yourself among that precious minority of republican or independent voices of resistance to this new plunge into world war? Just ask Representative Matt Gaetz who has been called out alongside other patriots such as Jim Jordan and Lauren Boebert for not applauding Zelensky’s pathetic speech in Congress this week. For the crime of keeping their hands from slapping in lock step with the rest of the congressional herd, NBC analysts like Michael Beschloss have attempted to stir up a McCarthyite witchhunt asking why these representatives refused to clap, asking:

“I’d like to know why that was for two reasons- Number one: You’re a public servant, we’re allowed to know those things. You’re supposed to tell us if you’re serving in Congress what the reason was. Do you love Putin, or are you just opposed to democracy, or is there something else?”

The fact that these figures even dared ask where graft was going probably touched a nerve too close to home with the Pentagon itself failing its fifth consecutive audit in November 2022 with over 65% of its assets and expenditures unaccounted for. That’s right, the government ‘lost track’ of $2 trillion in 2022.

Will enough Americans wake up to the reality that they have been walking on the wrong side of history for far too long or has the point of no-return already been crossed?